[chaostheory]

Yes the Japanese are polite and formal and like China there's a huge pressure to conform. However imo there's one key difference: the Japanese obsession with kaizen- constant improvement and striving for perfection. It may not override outward conformity for appearances sake, but imo there are enough Japanese who are madly in love and obsessed with the idea of attempting to achieve acme, that they're willing to risk everything else for it ie. look at things differently, disobey, risk embarrassment from failure, etc... Conversely with the Chinese, guangxi tends to be only fully actualized and achieved with money and expensive physical things that money buys. When it's just about money and there's no love, everything suffers like creativity and quality. The end result is a cheap shallow copy. The authoritarian gov exacerbates this problem.

[z2]

I'd caution against using broad strokes such as "The Chinese", which is a blanket identification that covers 1.2 or 1.3 billion people. Are you talking about the Chinese government that only cares about money and has 'no love' and promotes cheap shallow copies, or that every Chinese person is otherwise locked down to live a mediocre life while in China thanks to their government or their (implied to be) anti-disruption culture?

That said, kaizen as a Japanese industrial concept a la Toyota is continuous (small!) improvements, not broad ground-breaking change. With Japanese manufacturing, it was quite compatible with keeping with social norms on the surface and deeper, while optimizing to whatever goals. Kaizen as a broader life-philosophy term is known as gaishan in Chinese, where the word originated and is still used with some frequency, and is known as many other words in Buddhism, where the concept originated. Surely the inventors and practitioners of kaizen in South Asia and China haven't completely lost their love for improving things to the beckoning of material comforts and money?

[yourapostasy]

As an outside observer, anecdotally, culturally at this juncture (plenty of room to change), from the lower class to upper-middle class families I was able to interact with in China last year, I didn't get a sense gǎi shàn (改善) was commonplace. The prevailing sentiment I experienced was chà bu duō (差不多), "near enough"...but that isn't peculiar to China, I run into that world-wide. I have a loosely-held suspicion on why this apparently seems to be a universal human trait, mainly to do with the second law of thermodynamics.

The gǎi shàn meme (and its consistent practice) seems to me more highly correlated with specific organizations that promulgate it: families, companies, clubs, etc., than a particular ethnicity/nation. YMMV, of course; I'm interested in hearing where people see this meme practiced.

[z2]

You are absolutely right -- I was poking fun at the absurdity of saying that people as a culture or nation can be obsessed with self-improvement and perfection every waking moment.

I have heard the phrase used in the same empty way that many places must use it, along the lines of corporate pep-talks, such as "Listen up! We must improve and get better at what we do, etc. etc." This is obviously not the Toyota kaizen meme as said and did.

[seanmcdirmid]

Heck, anyone who has ever been to Japan can recognize that there is still plenty of flimsy chabuduoism in Japanese culture as well (no country is really that special in this regard).

[chaostheory]

Just because a concept originated in one culture/civilization, it doesn't mean the culture that created the concept will continue to embrace it and be the leader. Buddhism is one example. While it was spread to Japan via China, it actually originated in India. I would make a similar argument with gaishan.

At the moment, chabuduo reigns over gaishan in China.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-a...

> I'd caution against using broad strokes

Yes it can be dangerous using broad strokes. However are there no dominant features or beliefs in a particular culture regardless of its size? My opinions on Chinese culture both on the mainland and elsewhere were formed after a lifetime of exposure to it so maybe I'm biased.

> That said, kaizen as a Japanese industrial concept a la Toyota is continuous (small!) improvements, not broad ground-breaking change

I don't know as much about Japanese culture as I do about Chinese. What I mean is the Japanese obsession with mastery of an art or skill. I can't remember the word. I don't feel that it's shuhari either but I could be wrong.

[finid]

Everything comes and goes. It's just the nature of things. When it's your time to lead the pack, you will, regardless of the cultural environment. Most of us (in the West) don't know it yet, but we're already in the Chinese Age.

How long will their time last?

The funny thing about the influence of culture on innovation is that when this country (USA) was rewriting the rules and breaking down boundaries this way and that way, we were sending minorities to jail like "AI WW" and generally compelling them to behave and know their place.

[CuriouslyC]

Empires are transient, and the more they try to control the people they rule, the more transient they become.

China has bet the farm on continual economic growth, and that worked for a while, but they're close to parity with the west now, so maintaining that rate of progress is going to become much more difficult. When the government fails to deliver continual rapid quality of life improvements, autocracy is going to become a major liability. They are going to be forced to either rapidly democratize, or become increasingly isolationist. I suspect that the government will push for the latter, though in the long run democratization is pretty much inevitable. The djinni is out of the bottle, and it's not going back.

This isn't to say that I see China collapsing per se, but there are some major speed bumps on the path to global domination.

[finid]

I agree that China will eventually become a democratic country, but that will even make it stronger, not weaker. China is just getting started, so they're far from collapsing.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ai Weiwei is not a minority. In fact, the only reason he is not in jail continuously is because his family is very powerful ("noble") in China.

[nabla9]

This is stereotyping at it's finest.

China, even the Han-culture is not a monolith. There are huge cultural differences in China. One billion people are not 'one china' in anywhere else than communist propaganda.

There are differences in business culture, management hierarchy, language, food (what people in the west think as Chinese food is Cantonese food) and relationship with authority. People in eastern cities are culturally more individualistic and take more initiative than they do in other parts of China. That's something that foreign companies with subsidiaries in China have noticed.

[chaostheory]

No it isn't. It's like describing US society in the early 20th century and before as largely patriarchal - which was true. Yes there were outliers like the Women's suffrage movement, but they were just that - outliers and not most of society as a whole.

[jimmywanger]

> constant improvement and striving for perfection.

This happens in every culture when pressures are pushed upon it. For decades after WWII, Japanese goods and products were considered inferior and "just good enough", and specialized in cheap things that didn't really need to be high quality. External pressures (exports) forced more precision and rigor on them.

Same thing for China. Right now it manufactures many things for a low price to a low quality. Nobody really cares if a chew toy is to spec. Once things start mattering, like exporting for Apple, the cultural pressures start changing quickly.

Also, striving for perfection occurs in every culture. Look back at old Chinese teachers or masters of particular arts or culture. Simply attributing the way things are in certain areas during certain times to cultures is simplistic and naive. Sure, if the market pressures were there, China could manufacture goods to high tolerances. But there is no large market currently for extremely high quality mass market consumer goods, except for computers and cell phones, which China has locked up nicely.

[chaostheory]

> Look back at old Chinese teachers or masters of particular arts or culture.

The Shaolin masters and their philosophy are pretty much gone. Today those who train just end up leaving the temples and either joining private security or the military for money. Culture and society's values aren't static. I'm describing what is reality today, and not in a past century.

> Simply attributing the way things are in certain areas during certain times to cultures is simplistic and naive.

This isn't isolated to just exports. There's fake food, specifically rice and noodles made from plastic. Dangerous blood transfusion services. There's fake and poor quality meds. These exist regardless of market pressures and demand. There's a nothing else matters but my family and I mentality and a social hierarchy model that's hard to understand unless you grew up in it; living there for a year or a few months isn't enough.

[jzwinck]

Fake rice does not exist. It's a persistent rumour aided and abetted by social media in Asia ("Rice from XYZ in China is made from plastic, forward this message to everyone you love!" is the text of one message I received).

You will not find anyone who actually ate any of this mythical rice. Just friends of friends of cousins.

http://www.snopes.com/plastic-rice-from-china/

[chaostheory]

Fake food and fake pharmaceuticals are not rumors. They are real and well documented. It's old news. Even pets and babies are affected. It's so bad that people who can afford it import baby formula.